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Chewing the Fat While It's Fresh

FAIRBANKS, Alaska - AS Mary Ames dropped wedges of sweet potato into bubbling bear fat and readied strips of bear meat for the grill, she and her boyfriend, Ken Jouppi, gave me the back story on the beast before us.

Ken, a commercial pilot, had been flying near Denali National Park, about 125 miles south of Fairbanks, in August. There he crossed paths with a friend who had shot a 250-pound black bear but wanted only its fur. Ken thought of all that waste and of the extra space in his plane, and he naturally thought of Mary. Some men show their affection with jewelry and perfume. Ken showed his with a skinned carcass.

"I brought the bear home," Ken said, "and before I knew it, Mary was outside butchering it." He cast her an adoring glance.

"I butcher very rough: here's a chunk, there's a chunk," said Mary, a onetime trapper, sometime hunter and fellow pilot who uses her own tiny plane to sell Mary Kay cosmetics to women in remote Alaskan villages. "But I only got half of it done, because the yellow jackets were just going to town on it."

These wasps, she said, have carnivorous moments. I had not known this before a recent vacation in Alaska, where I learned -- and, more to the point, tasted -- a great many new and unusual things. Travelers to Portugal or Peru, Sweden or Sri Lanka, make it a point to sample indigenous food. I decided to treat Alaska no differently and to try meats more plentiful or permissible than in that girlie-man stretch of toastier states that Alaskans refer to, usually derisively, as "the lower 48." (Hawaii, somehow, gets a pass.)

And so on the early October night when Mary explained her butchering methods, I ate not only bear but also bowhead whale. I tasted boiled whale blubber, with a shameful result I will reveal shortly. I nibbled on dried bearded seal.

In the process, I had a few realizations: about the limitations of our lower-48 palates, the role of expectation in culinary enjoyment, the true meaning of "you are what you eat" and last but not least, the difficulty of matching wine to whale.

"What goes best with sea mammal?" my friend Elinor Burkett, who teaches journalism at the University of Alaska and served as my gastronomic guide, asked the cashier at the Goldstream General Store, which sells everything. We had stopped there on the way to the house where our exotic feast would take shape.

The store has wolf and Arctic white fox pelts hanging from the ceiling. The cashier wore a baseball cap and a befuddled look. He shrugged.

"White wine?" he said.

"And for bear?" Elinor asked.

"Beer!" he said, revealing himself to be an adherent of the one-vowel-tweaked school of food-alcohol pairing.

We bought a cheap chardonnay and a cheap merlot and continued on our way to the chateaulike hillside home of Michael Jennings, a philosophy professor at the university, and his wife, Jennifer Collier, the executive editor of the university's press. Jennifer greeted me with an Alaskan wildlife picture book.

"I thought we could view the fuzzy animals as we ate them," she said, only half kidding.

Not trusting my nerve to last for more than a few hours, I had clumped all my exotic victuals into this one banquet. Michael had received a care package from native Alaskans who are allowed to hunt and trade wildlife that others may not. He told me that our whale meat and blubber were from a 60-ton, 60-foot whale that had been hauled from the Arctic Ocean and cut up three to four weeks earlier.

Michael, Jennifer, Mary and Ken had also made contributions from their own larders, or from those of their friends: the bear, the rendered bear fat, caribou meat, a moose roast. Elinor larded the roast and threw it in the oven while I carried a platter of the boiled whale blubber to an outdoor deck.

Natives call this fat muktuk. Each square piece of it had a hunk of black whale hide affixed to it like a handle. I did as told: grabbed the hide and bit into the blubber. It tasted like a wedge of solid rubber that had spent several months marinating in rancid fish oil. And it flew instantaneously from my mouth into a thicket of nearby birch trees.

Michael took my glass of merlot away from me.

"You'll be needing Jack Daniel's," he said.

Lest I seem like a glutton only for punishment, I should briefly fast-forward a few evenings, to my other Alaskan feast: a salmon tasting that the owners of Lavelle's Bistro, an impressive restaurant in downtown Fairbanks, put together for me, Mary, Elinor and Elinor's husband, Dennis Gaboury.

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I wanted to compare, side by side, different kinds of Alaskan salmon or salmonlike fish. I was given fillets of white king salmon, silver salmon, red salmon and steelhead trout.

The variations in taste and texture suggested that differences among the fish themselves mattered less to our enjoyment of them than whether they had been frozen and how they were cooked. The silver salmon and the steelhead, both fresh, were by far the strongest in flavor and supplest in feel, and the steelhead, which had been poached, was appreciably moister than the silver salmon, which had been grilled.

A side note: for the silver salmon, Lavelle's had used a terrific barbecue sauce of ketchup, apple cider vinegar, chipotle, shallots, garlic and, most plentiful of all, cherry cola.

Back to the mammals. A dried strip of seal meat confirmed what the whale blubber had so potently demonstrated: if a mammal ingests enormous quantities of aquatic creatures, and those creatures are not coming in glistening fillets from Citarella, it will taste like the outrageously funky distillation of an entire ocean of the kind of seafood that Manhattan restaurants are most definitely not turning into sashimi or crudo.

I delicately spit out the seal meat after about 20 seconds of earnest chewing.

I did better with grilled whale meat, by which I mean that I succeeded in swallowing it. I had chewed it for nearly a minute first, because both Mary and Michael had oohed and aahed over what they said was the sweetness it slowly and gradually released.

I did not get sweetness. I got stringy fishiness, followed by ever-mushier fishiness.

Michael and Mary had eaten sea mammals before, so they did not have to get past the bald shock that I did to discern nuances that I could not. A palate, like a mind, works better with exposure and education and is a product of its environment.

Jennifer told me that some Alaskans who eat a lot of wild game can, upon biting into moose, figure out "when it was killed, what it was eating and whether there was a lot of trauma when it was killed -- in terms of adrenaline in its system."

All I could tell was that the moose we ate was infinitely tougher, tauter and leaner than, say, a Peter Luger porterhouse.

"That's because it had to work for a living," Mary said.

She said that before she butchered the bear and rendered its fat, she concluded, from where it had been killed, that it had been living not on fish but on berries, which augured sweeter, more delicate meat. She sautéed some of that meat for me and grilled some more, promising that it would taste like pork.

It did, albeit smokier, muskier, more complicated in a way that was hard to define. I actually had seconds. I also ate a half-dozen of the sweet-potato fries, which tasted richer but soggier than those cooked in conventional oil.

Slivers of caribou, sautéed in butter with onions, had a liverlike appeal. Was this a case of taste by association? Did flesh become more palatable as its source roamed or swam zoologically closer to the ingredients in one's usual diet? I regarded caribou, after all, as deer by a more exotic name. I regarded whale and seal, on the other hand, as the centerpieces of aquariums, not of dinner plates.

The influence of habit and prejudice was hammered home to me by a baby boy sitting in a high chair at the table with us. When Jennifer presented her and Michael's 10-month-old son, Brennan, with whale blubber, she deliberately cooed at him.

When Brennan put it in his mouth, she chirped excitedly and smiled wide. And so after a fleeting moment of visible puzzlement, he experienced it as a special treat. As I downed another swig of Jack Daniel's, Brennan gummed and licked that slimy whale fat as if it were Alaska's biggest, brightest lollipop.